Media representation of Spanish academic spin-off companies

What is it about?

Higher education institutions are subjected to rocketing pressures to transfer knowledge to industry while obtaining a revenue out of it for economic self-sustenance. One of the mechanisms to achieve so are academic spin-off companies, knowledge-based firms constituted by researchers themselves to profit from projects' findings. This paper examines the media coverage received by spin-off companies born out of the two most prominent universities in the Spanish state, namely, the University of Granada and the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

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Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Since knowledge transfer is paramount for universities to thrive in a global higher education market, that matter is at the very core of the building of institutional reputation, so object of PR and marketing strategies. Our paper unfolds how media outlets cover the topic of academic entrepreneurship —i.e., how they interact with press releases and other materials highlighting breaking news from academic spin-off companies—, thus it can help Communication departments and other similar entities to optimise their dissemination and PR strategies for such topic. Moreover, those academicians working on the commodification of science will find here some enlighting insights into how exachange-value driven production utterely permeates universities' performance as a whole, including the way in which they communicate to the society at large.